My uncle, Philip Pikul (Ellis Island, again: who knows what that surname really was, in Poland?) was a railroad man after he came to this country, a member of the "Bull-gang," those rugged and overworked and underappreciated souls who kept the trains running. They shoveled the stone to make the railroad bed, laid the ties that supported the rails, spreading out the enormous weight borne by the rails, hefting the rails, those enormously heavy, ingeniously-shaped lengths of steel on which the train cars rode, and drove the spikes, with nine-pound or more hammers, a la John Henry, which held the spikes in place. They also had to shovel snow from the tracks and the switches (which shunted trains or cars onto another set of parallel tracks, moving them out of the way of trains coming in the other direction), and walk track sections in all manner of weather and times of day in order to ensure that all was well. Theirs were the backs on which this country's prosperity was largely built.
My Uncle looked just like you'd expect someone who did that work would look: large, blocky, solid, the sort of person who has, as my college roommate once said of someone, "muscles in his shit." I really try to avoid cliche, but you'd almost have to describe his hands as "ham-sized," his fingers like kielbasa. Hey, I told you he was Polish: those two items, along with boiled cabbage and copious amount of beer, were necessary staples of his diet. His strength was legendary. There is a family story, perhaps apocryphal but one I choose to believe with all my heart and soul: Uncle once had a load of, I dunno, something, which he rented a horse and wagon to transport. He led the horse, and one section of road required going up a hill. The load was too heavy for the horse and, try as it might, it just couldn't pull the load up the incline. My Uncle, not a patient fellow, finally got so enraged at the beast that he punched it, killing it. He was of course brought to court by the horse's owner. The judge asked him to detail his side of the facts of the case, in which he freely admitted to the events described above. The Judge then allegedly said to him "And what did you do then, Mr Pikul?", whereupon my uncle replied "I got between the traces and pulled the wagon up the hill." Case dismissed. See why I want so badly to believe that story?
I was thinking of my uncle the other night, and of Albie Hearne, my neighbor as a kid, who was an engineer for the railroad, and who used to let me sit on his lap and actually work the throttle on the locomotive as he moved cars around the switching yard ("Drivin' that train..."), and how they would feel to have seen the results of their hard work and their livelihood destroyed by Dwight Eisenhower as a result of Ike's drive (yeah, I see the pun) to create the interstate highway system. I was sitting in the dark on the balcony of the place where we were having Thanksgiving dinner, cooling off, drinking a beer, and temporarily escaping the jabbering throng inside. The spot, which is actually quite lovely, is right on the Hudson River; in the middle distance is the impressively lighted outline of the Tappan Zee Bridge; in the near distance, the Ossining stop on the Hudson River Line (yeah, Billy Joel didn't make that up.). I watched a couple of commuter trains pass through the station, and felt so sad that that experience isn't more universal, riding on trains. We had the technology and the infrastructure, and we wrecked and rejected it, for the most part.
In most of the country, rather than that wonderful form of mass transit, we have cars and trucks commuting to and from work, which vehicles are generally occupied by one person, a travesty and a waste of staggering proportions. Rather than one mechanical beast carrying people and goods efficiently, to a common terminus, then to be dispersed by smaller carriers for shorter distances, we've chosen to eliminate the efficient middle-man and just go with inefficiency from the get-go, yet another example of the American lone-wolf-self-sufficient myth turned to a negative. D'oh!
Train songs this week, then, to be listened to alone while driving by yourself to some common destination:
"A" Train Lady Mink Deville
Take The "A" Train Duke Ellington
Betting On Trains Hem
Desperadoes Waiting For A Train Jerry Jeff Walker
Broken Train Beck
Death Of A Train Daniel Lanois
Freight Train Taj Mahal
Fast Train Van Morrison
Gone, Just Like A Train Bill Frisell
It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry Dylan
Just Like This Train Joni Mitchell
Silver Train Stones
You're No Train Kris Delmhorst
Yesterday's Train The Byrds
When My Train Pulls In Gary Clark Jr.
Waiting For A Train Dickey Betts
Two Trains Little Feat
Train Train Billy Bragg
Train Song (Demise Of The Caboose) Victoria Williams
Train Of Glory Jonathan Edwards
Train Leaves Here This Morning Eagles
Train In Vain The Clash
Train In The Distance Paul Simon
Train Home Chris Smither
Train Kept A Rollin' The Yardbirds
Train Mose Allison
This Train Sister Rosetta Tharpe
Something About Trains Jane Siberry
So c'mon aboard this Tuesday, noon till two on WOOL FM, 91.5, or www.wool.fm, streaming live on the webs. And please give up your seat to someone who looks like they need it more than you do!
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